


Speaking of Truth

by wiseorfool



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Gen, Implied Gokudera Hayato/Yamamoto Takeshi, In-line With Canon, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, future arc, implied Rokudou Mukuro/Sawada Tsunayoshi, too many hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-07-12 05:39:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7087453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wiseorfool/pseuds/wiseorfool
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the loss to Gamma, Gokudera drowns in his dreams and in his dreams there is a boy without a face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Speaking of Truth

The boy walking to Tsuna’s left has no face.

 

Gokudera doesn’t know why the boy walking to Tsuna’s left has no face.  He is smooth and featureless, a blank canvas painted over in sun-kissed skin tones.  Tsuna doesn’t notice and Gokudera doesn’t remember.  The conversation continues as it normally does, with Tsuna’s friendly chatter and the blank face tilting its head or nodding in time.  Sometimes the boy with no face gestures and Tsuna laughs.  Sometimes they both turn to him as though he’s said something, but he hasn’t.  Tsuna agrees with statements he hasn’t made, and the boy without a face shakes with laughter at funny things he hasn’t said.

 

It is an ordinary school day and it is not.  Gokudera feels his fingers twitch and the ground falls away beneath him.

 

Tsuna and the boy with no face keep walking, keep talking.  Tsuna asks the boy with no face a question with a smile.  He turns to his right, as if to say something to Gokudera, but Gokudera isn’t there anymore.  He’s lying on the ground a hundred meters back, a thousand meters back, a hundred thousand meters back, eyes and mouth wide.  He’s screaming.  Electricity is pouring through his muscles, locking them in an agonized rictus and he’s screaming, he’s screaming, but there’s no sound.

 

Tsuna doesn’t notice.  The boy with no face turns back only briefly.

 

They continue walking.

 

They turn a corner.

 

Gokudera sobs once, just once.  He closes his eyes and feels himself sink below the cracked pavement.  Sparks dance over his skin and between his fingers.  It feels like a blessing.  It feels like a curse.

 

Bianchi is there when he opens his eyes again.  He’s lying with his head on her lap and her fingers gentle in his hair and his stomach churns and roils even though half her face is covered or--

 

missing or--

 

wasn’t ever there to begin with--

 

The shape of her face is as familiar as his own, their shared parentage visible in his graceful fingers and the sharp curve of her jaw.  They take after their father (he wishes he didn’t), they share half their blood (he wants to die), Bianchi is his sister, his constant, the only family he acknowledges.

 

“Everything is going to be okay, Hayato,” she says.  She touches his cheek lovingly with the back of one hand.

 

He’s going to be sick.

 

No, he _wants_ to be sick, but the landscape won’t allow it.  Bile crawls into his throat and burns the delicate tissue, but his mouth is locked shut by another seizure.  His heels kick uselessly at the endless black expanse before him, unable to gain purchase in the depths.  His back arches until he’s sure it will snap, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t no matter how far he bends.  No matter how much he writhes.  No matter how much he begs to break.

 

“Everything is going to be okay,” Bianchi says again.  

 

Gokudera claws at his throat until the flesh caught under his nails gives way.  It comes off in long shreds, the curling twisted bits of wood left over after sharpening a pencil, but there is no blood, no blood at all.  The pale spirals flutter away, fading into the dark.  Bianchi says something in a garbled language he can’t understand but feels like he should be able to; her nails catch on his scalp and leave bloody furrows behind.

 

This is a dream, his screaming mind finally registers.  This is a dream, a nightmare.  He’ll wake up any moment and it will fade away like any other bad dream.

 

The boy with no face stands in front of him, stands firm on solid ground in front of him while Gokudera floats helplessly.  The IV in his arm (was it there before?) moves silently in a current he can’t feel.  Seawater floods his lungs.  He’s drowning, but he isn’t afraid.  His limbs ache in the aftermath of their violent spasms, but the water is warm.  Gokudera closes his eyes.  He wants to sleep.

 

“Aren’t you just being selfish?” asks the boy with no face.

 

Pain lances through his belly, but it isn’t the nauseating twist that follows Bianchi.  Gokudera opens his eyes and looks down.  He watches the skin an inch above his navel press outward with sick fascination.  It stretches until it can stretch no more and splits and burns.  There is no blood.  Brine follows the steel emerging from his stomach, liquid salt pouring down his thighs, more and more of it flowing as more and more of the blade pushes through.  The tip of the sword scratches glass and finally stops its slow progression forward.  He can feel the handguard pressing against his spine.  The boy without a face hasn’t moved, but Gokudera knows.  The sword is his (a name, why can’t he think of the name _why can’t he think of the name_ ).

 

He grabs at the glass frantically, the surface too clean and too smooth to grasp.  The IV slips out of the vein and spills something ink black into the water, water that’s gone too hot, almost boiling and he’s going to die in here, helpless and alone.  This isn’t what he wanted, this isn’t how he wanted to go out, he just wanted to be needed, wanted to be useful, wanted someone to acknowledge the hard work he’s put in, wanted someone to praise him, wanted to _help_ wanted to protect wanted to defend wanted wanted wanted wanted

 

 _But isn’t that just being selfish?_ his heart sings at him in despair. _He was right.  You were only thinking of yourself all along_.

 

The sky above is dark and scattered with constellations he doesn’t recognize.  Gokudera floats, loose-limbed and weak.  His body is whole, but he feels nothing.  He breathes out slowly; the last of the air leaves his lungs in a thin stream of bubbles and he feels nothing.  Tsuna is gone.  The boy without a face is gone.  All that’s left is Gokudera himself and an endless black.  He is utterly, inescapably alone, trapped in a dream and unable to wake up.  He wonders distantly if this means he’s dead, and these visions are his conscious mind’s last gasp.

 

He remembers the bubbles and shudders.  Lets his eyes slide mostly shut.  Watches the sky through his lashes.  Tries to exhale again and can’t.  There’s nothing left.

 

Nothing at all, save himself and the endless black.

 

Only his stupid flare of temper and the endless black.

 

 _He was right,_ his heart sings, quieter now.  Y _ou were selfish.  Selfish and stupid.  And now look what’s happened to you.  Can’t be anybody’s right hand man when you’re dead._

 

The sky watches him back, starlight winking in and out.  It whispers to him in that same language, the strange, mangled syllables that fell from Bianchi’s mouth that he should know but doesn’t.  Familiar and wrong all at once.  Something he used to know.

 

(Just like the boy without a face and his name.)

 

 _I can’t understand you,_ he thinks.  His heartbeat slows and quickens, as unstable as his thoughts.

 

“Aren’t you hasty,” says a voice in triplicate, layered over itself, harmonies overmixed and buzzing.  “Is it the impatience of youth, desperate to become something great too soon, or is it just a fault in your character?”

 

 _Mukuro_ , his heart sings, staccato against his ribs, a small bird caught in a plump housecat’s self-satisfied jaws.   _An illusion.  Not a dream_.

 

“No.”  Mukuro’s hands emerge from the black and catch Gokudera’s face.  His thumbs smooth over Gokudera’s cheeks, almost indulgent, and Gokudera, limp in the ocean’s grasp, doesn’t resist.  “This is very much a dream.  It is _my_ dream, in fact.  I’m surprised you stumbled in here, Storm Guardian.  I hadn’t taken you for such a talent.”

 

Gokudera tries to snap back, but fresh water pours from his mouth when he does, choking him in ways the sea water doesn’t.  A third hand blossoms out from the darkness.  Elegant fingers slip between his lips, between his teeth.  He can feel Mukuro’s thumb pressing uncomfortably into the corner of his mouth, the first real sensation he’s managed to parse since he started drowning.  A nail digs into his gums; it leaves a thin red crescent and the smell of copper in its wake.  Mukuro’s fingers close on something inside his throat and pluck it out.  Tufts of fox fur drift away into the abyss, forgotten.

 

He sucks in air-water-air.  Feeling returns to his hands, fizzing along deadened synapses.  It hurts.  Gokudera welcomes it, but his body doesn’t.  He convulses, coughs up more fur, and sinks.  Mukuro’s threefold voice sighs at him and a fourth hand, unseen, presses against his back, buoying him up.

 

“What a mess,” Mukuro says.  “You’re even more difficult than I remember.”

 

 _Why_ , Gokudera’s heart thrums in double time.  _You hate the mafia.  You hate us_.

 

“Yes.”  Mukuro’s face slides between distant stars and solidifies close, too close, to Gokudera’s.  “And no.”  He smiles, otherworldly and threatening, and Gokudera wonders what expression he must be making to earn a show of favor like this.

 

 _I can’t understand you_ , he thinks, and this time his heartbeat stays steady under Mukuro’s fifth hand, warm against his skin.

 

“No?  When Yamamoto struck you, was that hate or love?”

 

Gokudera shudders, unsteady on a precipice, a sunken ship teetering one last time before it surrenders to the depths.  Mukuro’s hands do not let him sink.  He remembers the boy without a face (Yamamoto) and the anger and accusation in his (Yamamoto’s) voice.  How steady his ( _Yamamoto’s_ ) hands were when they struck.

 

 _It can be both_ , his heart sings in revelation.  Yamamoto’s care for his comrades is not diminished by his frustrated rage.  Mukuro’s loathing for the mafia cannot (does not) erase his respect for (desire for) Tsuna.

 

“It can be both,” Mukuro echoes.  He kisses Gokudera’s forehead, his eyelids, his cheeks.  He presses a hand against Gokudera’s belly, palm flat over the space where Yamamoto’s sword ran him through, digs in his fingers until Gokudera kicks reflexively, his limbs slowly returning to uneasy life.  Only then does the pressure ease.  Slivers of steel twinkle in Mukuro's upturned palm until he discards them into the black.  They flicker weakly among the stars before vanishing entirely.  “But it is not yours to punish yourself with.”

 

There is salt on his eyelashes and salt on his lips.  Bianchi.  His father.  His mother.  Tsuna and Yamamoto.  So many failings and so many mistakes.  He wants to say he’ll punish himself for those as he sees fit, is desperate to say it, but the seawater filling his lungs refuses him the breath to speak.

 

Mukuro laughs, somewhere between chiding and mocking, a warm sound that ripples out of a body Gokudera cannot see and isn’t even sure exists.  “Shall I give you a hint?  A mistake is not a failure.  A mistake is a puzzle piece in the wrong place.”  

 

Mukuro’s hands carry Gokudera to a distant, invisible shore.  There is an IV in Gokudera’s arm again, taped securely to soft skin.  A mask on his face forces the seawater out of his lungs and the oxygen burns so badly he wants to scream.  His body is dull and unresponsive.  Stiff bandages weigh him down. The cloying scent of antiseptic makes him want to vomit.

 

“Don’t forget,” Mukuro says into the vulnerable curve of Gokudera’s throat.  “It can be both.”

 

Gokudera wakes up.


End file.
